about the artist
Connie Mississippi was born in 1941 in the Mississippi Delta. She attended high school in Memphis, TN and received a B.F.A. from the Memphis College of Art. From Memphis she moved to New York City’s Lower East Side where she lived for ten years. During that time she received an M.F.A. in painting and art history from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.
From New York she moved to Los Angeles where she lived for twenty five years. And from there she moved to Santa Fe, NM where she has resided for the last ten years.
The years in the Mississippi Delta formed her as a person and an artist. She found beauty in simple things and discovered her natural abilities as an artist when she was still a child.
Her artistic ability was encouraged by her family and her teachers and after her undergraduate work she went to NYC to pursue graduate studies and experience the life of an artist in an environment rich with culture and an infinite amount of information.
Her paintings during these years were hard edged with an influence of Steward Davis and Will Barnett. Three large paintings painted on a silk screened logarithmic grid were purchased by Rockefeller University for their permanent collection.
After moving to Los Angeles, Mississippi was painting on shaped three dimensional canvases and realized that she was making painted sculptures rather than paintings. She became interested in the lathe as a tool for making sculpture and spent a year working with a lathe artist learning turning techniques. Much of the wood available was too small in diameter to do what she wanted to with the sculptures, so she started laminating large pieces of Baltic birch plywood that she could turn on the lathe. These are some of her most successful works (see “early work” link).
Mississippi usually works in series, completing 50 turned pieces which hung in the Fig Gallery in Santa Monica along with a time line of her life to celebrate her 50th year. 100 pieces were turned and painted to honor the movement of our world into the new millennium. A time line of memorable years for the artist in the last century was included along with the sculptures.
For most of her adult life Mississippi has recorded her dreams. It was in Los Angeles that she began illustrating them and after moving to Santa Fe, she joined a dream group and continued to illustrate her dreams as well as to do active imagination taken from the dream.(see “dreams” link).
For the last five years, the artist has been studying the esoteric knowledge of Kabbalah. From this study have evolved paintings dealing with the Four Worlds – the physical, the psychological, the spiritual, and the divine. In addition using both paint and calligraphy, she has completed an illustrated book of Kabbalistic images.
Today the artist’s work is both two and three dimensional. Shifting from one plane to another, she may choose to laminate and carve a large “X” representative of an angelic form, or paint a “Tree of Life” using methods from illuminated manuscripts.
Her travels have been a significant part of her life and have influenced her work in innumerable ways. She has traveled extensively in Europe as well as Asia, particularly Japan. She has traveled in Israel, Egypt, India and into South and Central America. Peru is her country of choice for mystery and inspiration.
The artist’s life is more contemplative now although no less inquisitive and eager to explore new realms. She enjoys reading, yoga, Tai Chi, and horseback riding with her husband of thirty years. She writes articles about the wood art field for publication.